I noticed something that was irritating me this morning. The screen would go black after I chose to install CentOS 7 on VirtualBox. What you can do is choose Troubleshooting in the startup of the installer. Then choose Basic graphical install, this seems to get around the problem.

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I have not posted on my blog in a while but given that this is fitting is oddly fitting. As I am writing this my grandfather is moments away from passing. He has been very influential in my life; he was the one who first introduced me to fixing computers in the early 1990’s. He started my spark of curiosity of technology. For those of you who know me well, know I am obsessed with learning and using technology.

He also was always excited about fixing things and tinkering. He was an avid craftsman, and built many pieces of furniture. By trade he programmed/ran/maintained CNC mills and he was the best in his company at it.

I’ve had a missed opportunity, so many times I could have thanked him for all the inspiration and knowledge he imparted on me.

He is too far gone for me to say my final farewell, his breathing very faint and sporadic. So this post has to suffice. A parting note, please take a moment and thank the people in your life who have inspired you. They are few and far in between.

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Oh what a tangled web we weave when we don’t use unique constraints or primary keys…

Using some clever rules about deleting from a view (also applies to a common table expression). You can delete from a view if the view only references one table.

WITH cte(b, r)
AS (SELECT Field1,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Field1 ORDER BY Field1)
FROM dbo.Table1
WHERE Field1 IN (SELECT Field1
FROM dbo.Table1
GROUP BY Field1
HAVING COUNT(*)>1))
DELETE FROM cte WHERE r > 1;

Part of the trick is to use Row_Number to make a distinction between the rows. You can then delete anything that has a row number greater than 1 (a dupe)

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I stumbled across this article from one of my LinkedIn friends, Threads in C#

It answered one of my questions about thread pooling in a very concise, easy to understand fashion. It is a short article, but he then goes into the Task Parallel Library, something that I really enjoy.

If you are asking why should I care about this, I use the magic of Async/Await. These are the fundamental technologies and techniques that they are built upon.

Keep in mind that not many people are experts in highly concurrent systems, I am not one of them either. But hopefully by reading this article we will all be a little better in how we implement parallelism/concurrency.

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Chances are if you are reading this, you are a software developer. Relax, I am one too, as well as a database administrator. I spend a lot of time helping people to write code that is efficient or get the right results. I want to share this post on SQL Database Tuning http://www.toptal.com/sql/sql-database-tuning-for-developers by Rodrigo Koch. It provides some really good advice, especially for beginners in the area.

Really hits the nail on the head though, keep it minimalistic. Only return what you need, it takes more time on the server and then the data has to go over the network. He goes into some detail of how to troubleshoot slow queries and when to create indexes

This article is very insightful for covering mocking in Python. In case you don’t know mocking is a technique for testing where you don’t want to use a particular object or set of objects. For example, you might want to simulate database functionality while you are writing your test cases.